Blends interpretive essays with primary source documents (diaries, letters, travelogues, official documents and messages, newspaper reports, oral interviews) to provide a firsthand, widely varying, and distinctly human portrait of events and trends that shaped the lives of everyday Americans. Covers Father Marquette's accounts to pioneer life, to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the "Gilded Age", the prohibition era, the Great Depression, and the period of 1951-1976 in Chicago.